Tilt

This is a comedy/drama starring Brooke Shields. She plays a pinball wizard who gets conned into joining a pinball hustler who has a vendetta against an old nemesis pinball pro named “The Whale” (Charles Durning). Despite the fact that Shields is only 14-years-old, she leaves home with the guy and travels across the southwest, on the way to Texas. This film is ridiculous, but great campy fun. The characters’ actions are wrong on so many levels. No one seems to mind that a 14-year-old runaway has joined the pinball circuit! Durning has never looked fatter. Look for Lorenzo Lamas in a brief role. “Life is like a seagull. The more you feed it, the more it sh**s on you.”

Not yet available on DVD and probably even forgotten by Brooke Shields herself, this odd little picture was co-written by Donald Cammell of Performance fame, and he’s the reason I picked it up. With hints of liberated sexuality at its edges (in the opening scene, “Tilt” the teenage pinball queen played by Shields hitches a ride with a trucker and scares him away by suggesting they have an orgy with his wife!), the film Tilt is still very chaste and is really a family picture. I’m glad I watched it because it gives another credit to a real mystery man (Cammell), but don’t expect too much. Shields and Charles Durning give fine performances.

Adorable adolescent pinball princess Brooke Shields flees her slovenly, cacophonous parents, only to be exploited by an irksome, mendacious, moronic jackass (reprehensible Ken Marshall) who croons hick hokum when he isn’t whining. On the road, he profits from her expert hustling to finance revenge against his former employer, an enormously rotund pinball juggernaut (one conspicuously padded Charles Durning). It’s preposterous: Durning is presented as an ostensible villain for his girth and wholly warranted irascibility, while exasperating Marshall not only leverages a commercial advantage from his teenage charge under false pretenses, but pointlessly manipulates her to play as he can’t against a nemesis ultimately revealed as nothing of the sort. For those willing to stomach its senseless plot, godforsaken music and Marshall’s revolting presence, no small amount of good pinball footage and personable performances by Shields and Durning nearly redeem this late-’70s time capsule.